Cliff McCoy & Slicker part 1

Cliff McCoy (not forgetting Slicker, his faithful steed) replaced Tom Tex in Swift in the summer of 1955 in the pages of Swift, the strip marking Jim Holdaway's debut in the children's weekly. It wasn't his first weekly strip work nor his first weekly Western as he'd drawn Western strips for Junior Express and Mickey Mouse Weekly but it was his longest run in a weekly as he continued to draw strips in Swift for fifteen months. He was already drawing Romeo Brown for the Daily Mirror by the time he completed his last story and he stuck almost exclusively to newspaper strips for the rest of his career, bar a few odds and ends drawn between the end of Romeo Brown and the launch of Modesty Blaise.

Hope you enjoy this little lost gem. Part two tomorrow.

P.S. If you want a look at Tom Tex, drawn by Harry Bishop, I ran a brief sequence on Bear Alley back in February, which you can find here.

(* Artwork © Look and Learn Ltd. Reprinted by permission.)